Much was made this week about what is normally a polite and customary annual show of solidarity between the Irish Taoiseach and The President of the United States. You yawn as the Irishman hands over the pot of shamrocks to the President during the annual Paddy’s Day photo-op, but the revelation that Barack Obama can trace his roots to the same town as Taoiseach Brian Cowen got media outlets on either side of the Atlantic frothy!

That’s the trouble I have with the Irish sometimes: we try to claim anyone that is successful with even a thimble full of Irish blood as our own. The first person to break this news to the world was a Church of Ireland rector who scoured files from the church dating to the late 1700s and confirmed that Obama descended from Moneygall, County Offaly. You have to go back that far to find a drop of Irish blood in the man? Please. That’s not Irish, people!

That lack of Irishness didn’t stop the rejoicing: "There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama," a song written by the Limerick band known as Hardy Drew and The Nancy Boys, has had millions of hits on YouTube. This new website is perhaps the worst offender, placing Obama’s toothy grin in the print ads that hailed the launch of IrishCentral.com! It’s enough to make you choke on your black pudding, no pun intended.

I can’t figure out if Irish folks are dying to claim Obama as one of us because he is President or if he is black; my suspicion is the latter might be the case.

Let’s face facts: we are a pale nation. There is nothing black about us and it kills us because at the end of the day, we are a nation of soul. A pink, rosy soul, but soul nonethless.

When I take my shirt off on the beach, it looks like uncooked, misshapen dough that has been rolled in hair. It’s a far cry from the chiseled vision of light, sand dusted cocoa that we saw frolicking on a beach in Hawaii right before Obama took office.

The Irish people long to walk outside without the protective cover of floppy hats and long shorts that cover our milk white thighs. Our skin pigmentation is crying out for some color! No wonder we claimed this dark skinned man as one of our own!

The point that everyone is missing here is that the biggest, blackest, funkiest dude that ever lived was Irish. That’s right. Read it again. No misprints. You want proof? Here are three words.

Phil frickin’ Lynott.

Am I the only one out there that remembers Thin Lizzy? We don’t have to go back three centuries to find a cool dark-skinned Paddy to idolize! His mum was Philomena Lynott from Crumlin, County Dublin. He was lanky, lean, had an Afro that dared you to run a comb through it, and he had genuine Irish soul. The raspy, seductive drawl that made every word of “Whisky in the Jar” hang perfectly atop the murky rock melodies that transformed this traditional song into a hit. He was black. He was Irish. He even kept the groove funky by playing bass! He deserves our mad respect, not some faux-Presidential paddy!

Lynott might have become a one dimensional “VH1 Behind the Music” episode toward the end of his life, falling victim to chemical dependencies that claimed his kidney and liver in 1985, but no one played music like he did in his day.

I realize some of you online surfers may not have been walking the earth when dear Phil went down for his long dirt nap, so for anyone needing a crash course in this sweet Irish blackness should click over to Itunes and download Still Dangerous, the newly released live collection that finds Lynott tearing the roof off of Philadelphia’s Tower Theater in the Seventies. “Dancing in the Moonlight.” “Jailbreak.” “Me and the Boys.” All the Irishness you will ever need is right there.

We don’t even have to go that far back to find ourselves an African Irish badass. One of the coolest women that I have met in a long while is a gal by the name of Shaz Oye, a political activist hailing from the rough docklands of Dublin. She has a muck thick accent, cocoa skin, a tight knit of kinky hair, and deep brown eyes that pierce the soul. She also has a collection of deeply personal folk songs on her debut album, The Truth According to Shaz Oye.

Check out the effortless acoustic funk of “Blood on the Bone,” a tune that Joan Armatrading would mortgage her uterus to write. Just when you think this slab of brown bread has a crust that is too hard for your taste, she demonstrates her soft center with the sentimentality of “Dance with Me.” “Can’t always be roses/I don’t expect devotion ten years on/I’m selfish and I’m jealous,” she purrs on the track. For more information, log onto www.shazeoye.com.

Say it loud. We’re black and we’re proud!